Wikimania 2010 will be held in Gdańsk, Poland. The winning city was announced on May 7 after a lengthy committee deliberation process that lasted three weeks past the originally stated deadline. The other two final bidding cities were Amsterdam and Oxford. The Wikimania bid process requires communities interested in hosting Wikimania to outline their potential venue and accommodation options, a tentative budget and fundraising opportunities, and assemble a local bidding team. The bids are then presented on a page on Meta where the teams are open to questions from the bid jury and members of the community. In the announcement, the Gdańsk bid was praised for having an "organized team, roomy venue options, low cost for attendees, creative outing plans, and outreach potential to Eastern Europe."
The Wikimania bid jury committee is assembled every year for the purpose of choosing the Wikimania venue. This year the committee comprised four past organizers of Wikimania, one advisory board member, and the Foundation head of Public Outreach. Sue Gardner, executive director of the Foundation, and Michael Snow, chair of the Foundation Board of Trustees, acted as advisors.
The full report from the Wikimedia Foundation's Usability team is now posted. The study, which analyzed how people use Wikipedia through in-person and remote tests, was conducted in March 2009. A preview of the results was posted on the Foundation blog two weeks ago (see earlier story).
As part of the ongoing merger of the website of the International Herald Tribune (the international edition of the New York Times) into nytimes.com, the Tribune's archives were recently taken offline. This has created several thousand dead links in Wikipedia articles that use Tribune articles as sources. It is unknown whether the original iht.com links will be restored following the integration of the Tribune archives into the main New York Times website.
The dead iht.com links were brought to Wikipedians' attention by journalist Thomas Crampton, who complained in an open letter to New York Times publisher Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, Jr. that "You Erased My Career". Link rot is not a new problem for Wikipedia, and as one Wikipedian noted at Village Pump, "They're not the first -- or worst -- offender in this regard". Still, many of the thousands of Tribune references have incomplete citation data, making it difficult or impossible to track down the original source without a working URL. In a follow-up post about the situation on Wikipedia, Crampton suggested that "this presents a great opportunity for someone in the WSJ or Washington Post to build up the authority of their publication on Wikipedia: Find and replace the dead links to IHT articles with links to their own publication."
Tribune links currently lead to a page that states:
The rationale for the merger was noted in late March, but there was no indication that the archives would be disrupted.
Following the death of Maurice Jarre on 28 March, many newspapers carried an obituary that included a quote attributed to the French composer:
"One could say my life itself has been one long soundtrack. Music was my life, music brought me to life, and music is how I will be remembered long after I leave this life. When I die there will be a final waltz playing in my head, that only I can hear."
The quote, it was revealed this week, was lifted from Wikipedia. It was a hoax perpetrated by Shane Fitzgerald, a 22-year-old college student in Dublin, Ireland. Fitzgerald came clean this week, explaining that he had inserted the quote into Wikipedia while working on an essay about globalization and the media but hadn't expected it to be picked up beyond blogs and minor news sources. Instead, it spread to newspapers across the globe.
"My aim," Fitzgerald said, "was to show that an undergraduate university student in Ireland can influence what newspapers are doing around the world and also that the reliance of newspapers on the internet can lead to some faults." No newspapers had caught the fake quote before Fitzgerald contacted publishers.
The quote was added between Jarre's death and the obituaries that began appearing three days later. As The Irish Times notes, Fitzgerald added unsourced quotes several times; the second time his quote remained in the article for over 24 hours, while the first and third times it was removed more quickly.
A story published this week on Wikinews, "Congressional computers continue to be used to vandalize Wikipedia", reports on recent "questionable edits" that have been made from IP addresses assigned to the U.S. Congress. In addition to whitewashing the biographies of politicians, recent edits from Congress include "highly biased statements to articles related to abortion" and "racial slurs and references to gay pedophilia" in the biography of Catholic League president William A. Donohue.
Birds are popular subjects for writers, artists, photographers and scientists. They are important in religion and culture, popular as pets and on the dinner table, and millions count birdwatching as a hobby. It is no surprise that they are also popular subjects of articles on Wikipedia, with an active Birds Wikiproject that assists editors in improving these articles. The project page hosts frequent debates on Wikipedia conventions especially on the article name capitalization convention.[1]
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Future challenges include high-traffic articles[2] such as Penguin, Parrot and Cockatoo. Several of WP Birds' most visited pages are in need of a considerable amount of work to get them to featured status. Interestingly, most bird-related articles rely on primary references especially from peer-reviewed journals. Secondary references such as family monographs or specialized group guides are often either outdated or expensive[3] and hard to find. The project has debated the sourcing guidelines of Wikipedia, and has noted that some secondary references can be unreliable.[4]
There are dilemmas in some high-traffic articles where common-names do not match classification. For example, the high traffic duck overlaps in scope with the much-less visited duck family article, Anatidae, as it includes geese and swans as well. This has led to some debate on how to proceed, and brings up issues on WikiProject Birds' purpose and a need to reflect on folk taxonomy versus biological classification.[5]
Another issue with writing bird articles is one of countering systematic bias. In bird-related articles this manifests in several ways: a bias towards taxon articles and a neglect of conceptual articles relating to ecology and behaviour (such as bird migration, bird vocalization etc.); within the taxon articles there is a bias towards species with higher level taxa (family and order) articles left underdeveloped. The best species articles themselves tend to be those that are found in the English speaking and developed countries. Of the first 50 featured articles on birds, over 40 are about individual species, whereas just 5 are about families (and one is both a species and family). Only two species articles and a family article deal exclusively with South American birds, and there are no articles for families unique to Africa or Asia. Many of the species covered have wide ranges that may include these under-represented parts of the world, but importantly, they are also found in Europe, North America or Australia and New Zealand.
There are good explanations for this bias. While articles about families, genera, orders and even generalised types of birds are more important than individual species articles, they are also much harder to write. Sources are difficult to find, and information from numerous sources needs to be combined to make general statements about the higher level taxa while avoiding original research by synthesis. This is particularly problematic when some species of a family or group are found in the less-developed parts of the world where published studies can be lacking or hard to find. Editors may find themselves typing "birds in the family x all do y, except for a,b and c, which do z" and "some frigatebirds do this" and "most bango-birds sound like bangos" over and over. Species, on the other hand, tend to be more conducive to sweeping statements like "Lesser Bango-birds live in Armenia and eat frogs and sound like a bango". The problem with conceptual articles with a wide scope (such as birdwatching, ornithology, bird migration) is similar but additionally lack an established structure that multiple authors can accept and follow. These articles need to cover not just facts, but also historical, methodological and philosophical aspects.[6][7]
Regional bias is even more difficult to combat, due to the underlying imbalance in research. There are more ornithological studies in the developed world.[8] In the less-developed world, funds for bird research typically focus on rare species. For example searching for the Common Blackbird (Turdus merula), a common European species and featured article, on the Web of Science results in 406 citations, whereas the Andean Slaty Thrush (Turdus nigriceps), a South American species of the same genus covered by a stub article, has just one paper published on it. It is hardly possible to generate a featured article for a species that only one study has ever been published about.
Wikiproject Birds maintains a collection of resources to help editors write good bird articles (and hopefully Featured ones). Most important of these is the accumulated collection of references that are reliable, online and free. Many important journals have made older issues available to all and these form an invaluable resource when writing reliably about birds. At WT:BIRD you'll also find additional help, and regular challenges in the form of bird identification requests. And finally, there is an informal guide to writing about birds, written especially to aid school and university projects.
In this week's edition of the WikiProject Report, we focus on a project dedicated to the King of Pop: Michael Jackson. Having only existed since July 2007, WikiProject Michael Jackson is one of Wikipedia's younger projects, but it already has 3 Featured Articles and 21 Good Articles. Here to tell us more about the project is Realist2, lead contributor to much of the project's recognized content, including the article on the "king of pop" himself.
1. Although you successfully brought Michael Jackson to Featured Article status, the article has had a tough time getting there. In just over three years, the article has had a failed Good Article nomination, a Good Article reassessment, five unsuccessful Featured Article candidacies, and five peer reviews. What is it about Michael Jackson that makes him so difficult to write about?
I think that is a very interesting question for a number of reasons. Jackson is such a high profile public figure, everyone has heard something about him and everyone knows something about him. There also seems to be conflicting media portrayals of this individual in different areas of the world. In the UK and the US a largely negative tone is set by the mainstream press. In Europe, Japan and parts of South America the press coverage is not as negative. With Jackson we are dealing with an incredibly gifted individual. He sings, writes songs, dances, creates music videos and runs a publishing business amongst other talents. There are then the various controversies that need discussing. All this needs covering within the article and it leads to a terribly complex yet interesting biography.
Certainly the hardest part about getting an article like Michael Jackson featured is complying with WP:BLP, WP:NPOV, WP:UNDUE, WP:RECENTISM and maintaining an international perspective. During the successful FAC there were conflicting opinions amongst reviews as to what should and should not be included in the article.
Although the article is now featured it would quickly slip from that position if I (or the half dozen other regular editors) did not continue to watch over it. Every other week we have to deal with ludicrous tabloid stories and the traffic such stories generate. I recently put the article through a successful peer review, hopefully it will remain featured for many years to come.
2. Why is the Michael Jackson article currently semi-protected?
The Michael Jackson article is indefinitely semi protected, and has been for several years. This applies to numerous other BLPs such as Madonna (entertainer) and Britney Spears. These article are susceptible to high levels of vandalism, pov pushing and edit wars. The community is conflicted with the whole BLP issue. Some (such as myself) believe BLPs should be liberally semi protected while other editors believe that BLP concerns are over exaggerated.
With the Jackson article specifically, removal of the semi protection would cause serious problems. You only have to look at Talk:Michael Jackson (which is not semi protected) to see how much vandalism the subject attracts. At times the article talk page has been semi protected, but this is a rarity.
Unfortunately editors seem to have an unhealthy interest in painting public figures in an unfavorable light and articles often read like a tabloid hit piece. In regard to good faith editors, it seems like every (poorly written) biography has either a controversy or criticism section (both of which I strongly dislike). Many of the newer editors have a misconception that without such sections the article is not neutral. Maybe such controversies receive wider coverage in the press, I don't know.
The Jackson article, like many others, is semi protected because of the editing habits and people we attract at Wikipedia. Many people do not come here to write professional articles unfortunately. I believe a culture shift is needed within the community before such articles can be freely accessed by IPs and new accounts. Unfortunately, I am not sure this will ever be possible and semi protection will spread further throughout Wikipedia.
3. Do you think the article (and other biographies within the scope of the project) could benefit from some form of flagged revisions?
The whole flagged revisions proposal is a real surprise to me. It is a very bold move and Wikipedia tends to shy away from change, we are often entrenched in our ways. While I often advocate for change at Wikipedia, and support the protection of BLPs more than most editors, I have genuine concerns about flagged revisions. Certainly they will benefit biographies, no question about that, but it seems a little extreme and more than a little confusing to the outside world.
Instead, I believe that the criteria for semi protection should be relaxed in relation to BLPs and other controversial topics. We could also do with a three tier system to protection. There is a huge difference between semi protection and full protection, we need something to fill that gap. If liberal protection does not work, flag revisions is still an option.
Regardless, something has to be done and I will happily support flagged revisions over the current mess we find ourselves in. It is a shame that so many of our hard working voluntaries have to spend their time protecting articles instead of writing them.
4. Semi protection allows only autoconfirmed accounts to edit the page, whereas full protection allows only administrators from editing the page. What sort of protection would you advocate to fill that gap? Perhaps something involving section editing or a restriction on the total amount of text added/removed during an edit?
Well, reading from policy, 4 days old and have made at least 10 edits are considered autoconfirmed. This is an extremely low threshold in my opinion, any account that is 4 days old with at least 10 edits can freely edit a semi protected article. A middle tier of protection could restrict editors with fewer than 150 edits and one month experience. Hopefully these editors would have familiarized themselves with the BLP policy (amongst other things) by that stage. I would also advocate that editors need to attain a higher level of experience before they are "auto confirmed" to edit BLPs specifically. I imagine that restricting section editing or the amount of text would be technically difficult to implement and impossible to gain consensus on. It is quite difficult to get 75% (ridiculously high threshold I know) of people to agree to something and we seem to get lost bickering over the fine details of complex proposals.
5. Moving on to the other articles under the scope of WikiProject Michael Jackson. You've brought several of his albums to Good Article status. What skills have you learned or employed in the process?
The most challenging aspect in getting articles like Off the Wall and Blood on the Dance Floor: HIStory in the Mix to GA is research. The majority of English speaking media focus on Jackson's personal life over the finer details of his music and artistry. This, coupled with the fact that Jackson rarely allows interviews, makes it difficult to write substantive articles on his music. It can literally take weeks of researching. GA reviewers often find this difficult to appreciate, that such a mainstream artists music is only discussed in general terms.
Jackson's last studio album received mixed reviews from critics. However, if you actually read some of the professional reviews, they really lack in substantial critical analysis. Many professional reviewers went into more detail on Jackson's personal life than the album itself. It will be interesting to see how the world reacts to a new studio album. Will reviewers do their job correctly? Considering all that's gone on in recent years, can we really expect an unbiased review of a new studio album? It will certainly be challenging to write such an article. The same could be said about Jackson's upcoming concerts, press coverage has generally been unfavorable despite overwhelming public interest. I'm not convinced the press will we able to review the performances in an objective, substantive manner. I have certainly learned a lot about where and how to find material to write these articles.
Another issue is neutrality, I will often bump those who strongly dislike Jackson, and on the other side, those who really like him. Neither are here to write an encyclopedia (rather push their agenda) and I often find myself trying to reach a compromise between the two sides.
6. There has been discussion within the project over the possibility of a merger with WikiProject Janet Jackson. Why is that?
Michael and Janet Jackson had Wikiprojects of their own, so it seemed logical to also start a project for The Jackson 5 related articles. The vast majority of articles relating to the musical group are not covered within the scope of WP:MJJ believe it or not. It is not clear by any stretch of the imagination which articles fall within or outside the scope of WP:MJJ. Consensus and custom has shown that editors do not want Jackson 5 related material to be included within the scope of WP:MJJ.
Therefore, I considered starting a separate project for the famous group, but this would have caused unnecessary overlapping of project tagging. For example, it could be argued that Joseph Jackson falls within the scope of WP:MJJ, WP:JANET and a newly created Jackson 5 project. It would have been a little ridiculous in my opinion. Instead, I proposed that all articles relating to the Jackson family would be brought together into a super project of 450+ articles, WP:MJJ and WP:JANET could be disbanded as redundant.
Unfortunately consensus could not be reached and Jackson 5 articles are not covered anywhere. I plan to restart the debate amongst project members this summer.
7. Finally, how can aspiring new editors contribute to Michael Jackson-related articles?
Well, I certainly feel that Jackson's singles could be covered better, so improving these would be a great help to us all. I would advise new editors to avoid using fan sites as sources, they are simply not allowed. I would also like to see The Jackson 5 and the Jackson family improved, hopefully we can get them to good article quality soon. During the summer I will be compiling a list of reliable publications/websites that can used on Wikipedia, to help project members determine what is or is not a reliable source. Search Google, Google news and Google books for information, you might just find something interesting to write about. Try adding actual content to articles instead of fiddling with musical genres, track listings and credits. I would also ask editors to invite new members to the project.
Reader comments
Three editors were granted admin status via the Requests for Adminship process this week: Rjanag (nom), Dinoguy1000 (nom) and Laser brain (nom).
Seven bots or bot tasks were approved to begin operating this week: SoxBot (task request), Sambot (task request), Legobot III (task request), Sambot (task request), Polbot (task request), M-Bot (task request) and ListasBot (task request).
Nine articles were promoted to featured status this week: Franklin Knight Lane (nom), Fort Ticonderoga (nom), Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver (nom), Bruce Castle (nom), Arthur Henry Cobby (nom), Nancy Drew (nom), Nancy Cartwright (nom), SS Pennsylvanian (nom) and United States Academic Decathlon (nom).
Twelve lists were promoted to featured status this week: Kronos Quartet discography (nom), List of sultans of the Ottoman Empire (nom), List of Olympic women's ice hockey players for Canada (nom), List of number-one albums of 2008 (Japan) (nom), List of United States Military Academy alumni (Medal of Honor) (nom), List of Grade I listed buildings in West Somerset (nom), List of Silver Slugger Award winners at designated hitter (nom), List of Silver Slugger Award winners at pitcher (nom), 2009 WWE Draft (nom), 2008 World Series of Poker Europe results (nom), List of alumni of Jesus College, Oxford: Clergy (nom) and List of Detroit Red Wings players (nom).
One topic was promoted to featured status this week: Seasons of Veronica Mars (nom).
No portals were promoted to featured status this week.
The following featured articles were displayed on the Main Page this week as Today's featured article: Exosome complex, Haumea, Ursula Franklin, Restoration of the Everglades, Pontiac's Rebellion, The Million Dollar Homepage and Eli Lilly.
No articles were delisted this week.
Six lists were delisted this week: List of United Nations peacekeeping missions (nom), List of awards and nominations received by Adele (nom), List of awards and nominations received by Natasha Bedingfield (nom), List of awards and nominations received by Blink-182 (nom), List of awards and nominations received by Good Charlotte (nom) and List of Australian national cricket captains (nom).
No topics were delisted this week.
The following featured pictures were displayed on the Main Page this week as picture of the day: Greater Crested Tern, Wire brush, German Instrument of Surrender, Painted Lady, Propaganda of the Spanish–American War, Excavations in the Atapuerca Mountains and Sumo wrestler.
No media files were featured this week.
Four featured pictures were demoted this week: File:Denver Lightning.jpg (nom), File:Keplers supernova.jpg (nom), File:Pieris brassicae caterpillar.jpg (nom) and File:Meadow Argus02.jpg (nom).
Thirteen pictures were promoted to featured status this week and are shown below.
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This is a summary of recent technology and site configuration changes that affect the English Wikipedia. Please note that some bug fixes or new features described below have not yet gone live as of press time; the English Wikipedia is currently running version 1.44.0-wmf.8 (f08e6b3), and changes to the software with a version number higher than that will not yet be active. Configuration changes and changes to interface messages, however, become active immediately.
The Committee removed access to the Checkuser and Oversight tools from editors who had not used them in the past year. They also opened a Request for comment on dispute resolution.
The Arbitration Committee opened no cases this week, and closed none, leaving nine cases open.
